Baby Blues
by windsworn
Summary: What’s a couple to do when they can’t give birth? Adopt…or is there another way? Ron x Hermione, Harry x Draco, plus some surprising other pairings…read and find out!
1. Chapter 1

**Baby Blues**

Summary: What's a couple to do when they can't give birth? Adopt…or is there another way? Ron x Hermione, Harry x Draco, plus some surprising other pairings…read and find out!

**A/N: **No kidding; this idea came out of nowhere one Friday night before school started. Now it's out of my mind and into yours – good luck with it. I hope you're intrigued as much as I am how this is going to turn out! Please review if at all possible – both positive and negative are greatly encouraged…I'm always looking for new ways to improve, or new ideas. Thanks for reading!

**Chapter One**

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"You want me to do _what_?" Harry stared at his best friends in amazement.

"We're sorry to drop this on you, Harry, but the healers at St. Mungo's have told us it's the only way." Hermione held the hand of her husband tightly as she explained to her long-time friend.

"I-I can't. That's cheating; it has to be!" The young man protested, running fingers through unruly raven hair.

"It's not cheating if all around consent. Please, Harry, I'm willing to try just about anything right now." Ron covered his other hand over Hermione's clasped one. The position gave them a huddled appearance; the look of a defeated couple.

Harry tried another tactic, reasoning. "Look, Hermione, didn't you research it? Can't you figure out some other cure for this?"

"I searched everywhere – I, I even returned to Hogwarts to see if there was anything useful in the restricted section. That's where I came across this idea."

"A fertility rite? How do you know if it's even possible?"

Hermione made an exasperated sigh, honed from long experience with more ignorant wizards. Even ten years after leaving the wizarding school she still behaved as if fellow students asked her glaringly obvious questions. "It came from the _Galenic Encyclopedia of Previously Mysterious Magical Illnesses and Medical Curse Effects._"

"That was in the Restricted Section? Shouldn't it be outside in the general library?" Harry was slightly relieved to find a topic that wasn't as uncomfortable as the one they'd begun the conversation with.

"Most of it is, but I noticed several torn pages in the unrestricted version. So I did a little digging in the Restricted Section." Hermione smiled, obviously proud of her research. Ron nodded, patting her hand. Lately he seemed to let his wife do most of the talking for him.

"How'd you even get in?" Harry leaned back in his chair, amused.

"I have friends in convenient places, Harry. You're not the only one with liberties." She seemed smug.

"You mean teachers." Harry translated.

"Well, you know, she was always the teacher's pet." Ron smirked.

Hermione gave him a rather severe look, resembling, at least to Harry, McGonagall. 'She would probably make a fine teacher at Hogwarts, if she hadn't started doing Auror work.' He thought to himself.

"You would have done well too, Ron, if you hadn't been so disrespectful in your final year." Hermione was pointing out to Ron.

"I got tired of the prefect drill." Ron shrugged. "So I stopped caring."

"You almost lost the chance to get a good job. If I hadn't helped you so much-"

Harry was enjoying the friendly banter when the front door opened, surprising the group in the living room. The newcomer paused, grey eyes scanning the room. The eyes paused briefly over Ron and Hermione on the couch, and lingered on Harry, sitting across from the two in a comfortable armchair.

"Long time no see, Weasleys." Harry's roommate and lover entered the flat, pausing to take off his overcoat, hanging it in the entry closet.

"Malfoy. I assume you've been dandy." Ron tried for a smile and lost, just barely.

"Oh, quite fine. But you two seem tense – kids giving problems or something of the sort?"

The couple on the couch flinched at the remark.

Draco's eyes widened and he looked at Harry for confirmation. "Did I hit too close to home?"

"Honey, why don't you take a seat?" Harry sighed. Just what he needed. A slight throbbing in his forehead warned him that a headache was quickly rising.

Draco, for his part, seemed worried. He quickly moved over to the armchair, sitting on the chair arm, then reaching out to stroke his partner's hair. "What's the matter?" he murmured.

"Why don't you let them bloody tell you?" Harry snapped irritably, rather annoyed by the turn of events. He had wanted to avoid the shocking discussion as much as possible really. But he didn't stop Malfoy's hand from its ministrations.

The opposite pair looked at each other. Ron asked softly, "Do you want me to-?"

"Go ahead. Maybe you should explain the whole story." Hermione offered.

"Yes, please. Tell me how this all got started." Harry interrupted. Hermione glanced at Harry's rather irritable expression, moved to the worried and suspicious look on Draco's face, and finally settled on her husband's resigned features, which had taken a turn for the worse since the news was first received. She leaned over and kissed his cheek, a wish for good luck. He smiled back at her. Finally, he faced the other couple.

"All right, it all started six years ago." Ron sighed and began.

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**A/N: **All right…so you guys tell me what you think! Should I give it up as a bad job, or keep going? If you're wondering about length, by the way, the chapters willseriously get much longer if I know people are interested! So review, please! 


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: **This took an incredibly long time to update, but no, I haven't forgotten about this story! In fact, I have so many directions for the plot; it has been taking a while to sort through them all. So let's keep going, ne? I would apologize to you guys out there who are offended by slash fics, but the slashyness is really necessary for my plot, and not simply because of fangirl pleasure. So it stays.

Please read and review! I accept and welcome all suggestions, comments, etc. So don't be shy!

**Chapter Two**

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"Six years back, Hermione and I were given our first assignment on the job as Aurors, you remember, cleaning up the mess You-Know…" Ron shook his head, "_Voldemort_ had left behind.

"It was pretty exciting at first, the assignment. We had to return to the headquarters of the Death Eaters and see if there were any traces of bad spells still hanging around. They wanted that house Voldemort had been staying in to be able to be occupied again by muggles."

Harry nodded, remembering the Riddle house as he had last seen it; the day he killed Lord Voldemort. It was vaguely ironic that Voldemort had been killed in the same house Voldemort had poisoned his own father; but as a result of all the deaths that had occurred in the single location, the Riddle house would have been quite a task to clean up – both the physical and metaphysical sense – so that it could be made habitable for muggles. Malevolent spirits often haunted places where much blood had been shed, and the motivation for all that split blood only made the spirits harder to remove. The purifying of that house must have been an incredibly long and difficult task, not to mention dangerous. 'What a bludger of a first assignment.' Harry thought sympathetically.

"So while we were, well, cleaning up," here Ron swallowed audibly. Hermione squeezed his hand. "This _thing_ came out of nowhere and attacked us."

"We believe it may have been some sort of ghoul, possibly a banshee – nothing too unusual." Hermione clarified in a relatively calm voice; however, she seemed as frightened at the memory as her husband. Her hands trembled in her husband's grip, and her expression had turned to one of distant fear. Harry frowned; what about this "normal" ghoul could have made his two best friends so spooked that six years down the road they still had trouble talking about it?

"The creature was bloody powerful. We hacked at it with spell after spell and nothing seemed to work. Still it came squealing after us." Ron made hand motions in conjunction to his explanation.

"Finally we managed to trick the ghoul into leaving this plane of existence." Hermione continued for Ron as he got caught up in the battle with the banshee. "I found an existing altercation between the space-time and magical continuums, and weaved a simple dimension relegation sequence – you know, the one all Aurors should keep handy – and extradited it from the physical visual periphery." She looked at Harry for acknowledgement.

To his credit, Harry nodded, but the description was still floating in his mind. What exactly did she do to the thing?

"Bloody hell woman, couldn't you have just said you got rid of it?" Draco muttered.

"Oh, is that what happened?" Harry murmured back, eyebrow raised.

"In five words, yes." Draco smirked. "You always do get lost on the terminology."

Harry opened his mouth to protest: that other occasion had been the only time he'd ever had such a problem, and why couldn't he live it down; however, Hermione proceeded to continue the explanation. She was content, to her knowledge, that Harry understood exactly what she had meant about the ghoul's fate.

"So even though Hermy kicked the ghoul's ass into the next dimension, it still left a rather nasty present back for us."

"Actually, I wasn't able to exorcise it completely; the ghoul seemed to have self-destructed before my spell was complete."

"And as part of that self-destruct mode, it put a final curse on us." Ron finished, his mood moving quickly from excited to bleak.

"What sort of curse is this?" Draco asked, actually interested for once. It had appeared to him that finally the pair had stuck their noses into something even they could not bluff their way out of. 'Maybe because Harry isn't there to save them anymore.' He mused to himself.

"It's a curse of infertility, as far as we can tell from the message and the signs afterward." Ron shifted in his seat: he leaned to one side, then the other, checking his pockets.

At last, after a long pause, he found a worn slip of paper. "We copied down the riddle on a scrap of paper; the original message was made up out of green smoke that appeared when the ghoul disappeared.

"May I?" Harry held out a hand to take the paper. Ron nodded and handed it to him. Draco leaned closer to his partner, reading the short message on the slip of paper.

_Two is a pair and three is a crowd;_

_Four is enough to make everyone loud._

_But what will you do, o, what can you do?_

_Now you must borrow; it can never be new._

"It sounds more like fortune-telling to me." Draco said dubiously as he finished reading.

Both Hermione and Ron shook their heads. Hermione sighed and replied, "I was not going to mention this at first; but when we were first given the assignment, I was six weeks pregnant. A few days after reading that riddle, my child…died."

"We couldn't understand it at first." Ron embraced his wife consolingly. "Hermione would get pregnant and all would seem fine until the second month, then the baby would just die."

"It went on like that for the past five years or so. Then Ron and I started to think about the situation from a different light. What if the mission at the Riddle house and all the miscarriages were related? I thought I was grasping at straws, but we've tried every other diagnostic possible. Muggle doctors don't see anything wrong biologically; yet everything from natural conception to _in_-_vitro_ fertilization fails after a certain period. Our healers think that it's simply coincidence because nothing's wrong magically; however, all their fertility spells, potions, and charms just fail the same way muggle methods do."

"Why do I have the feeling this is where I come in?" Harry asked suspiciously.

"It's more than a feeling; it should be a dead giveaway." Draco commented.

"This is our last hope for a child of our own blood." Hermione pleaded.

"All right, let's hear it." Harry closed his eyes. Somehow, he had the feeling that his life, if it hadn't already, was about to become far more complicated.

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Yay! Second chapter done! Hopefully I'll be able to get them up at least once a week, but the weekends are really the only time I get to work on writing…so bear with me please! I promise I'll make it worth your while! and as always, don't forget to review! 


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